John Quincy Adams to John Adams

Mr. Thaxter and brother Charles wrote both to you the day before yesterday and as
I had no subject to write upon, I did not write But I can now give you an account
of our journey.

We dined on Monday at Haerlem and arrived at Leyden at Six oclock. We lodged at the
Cour de Hollande and saw Mr. Waterhouse that evening. The next day we went to hear
a Medicinal lecture by Professor Horn, we saw several experiments there. In the afternoon we went to Hear a Law lecture
by Professor Pessel.1 Each lecture lasts an hour.

Yesterday Afternoon we moved from the Cour de Hollande to private lodgings in the
same house in which Mr. Waterhouse boards our address is Mr. &c. by de Heer Welters,
op de lange Burg, tegen over t Mantel Huis. Leyden.2

I was to day in company with the parson of the brownist Church Who seems to be a clever
man, he is a scotch-man but does not pray for the king of England.3

I should be glad to have a pair of Scates they are of various prices from 3 Guilders
to 3 Ducats those of a Ducat are as good as need to be but I should like to know whether
you would chuse to have me give so much.

Mr. Waterhouse says that for riding I must have a pair leather breeches and a pair
of boots. I should be glad if you would answer me upon that as soon as you receive
this for there is a vacancy here { 40 } which begins to morrow and in the vacancy is the best time to begin to learn to ride.

In the vacancy there will be no lectures at all but our Master will attend us all
the while as much as when there is no vacancy.

I continue writing in Homer, the Greek Grammar and Greek testament every day.

2. That is, at Mr. Welter's (more fully and correctly, F. Weller's or Willer's) in the
street called Langebrug (Long Bridge) near the Mantle House. Recent efforts to identify
the house have not succeeded, but it was not far from the main University building
on the other side of the Rapenburg canal and still closer to the cathedral called
the Pieterskerk (views of both buildings are reproduced in this volume) and to the
Kloksteeg (Bell Lane), where Pastor John Robinson had ministered to his company of
self-exiled English Separatists from 1609 to 1620 (and for some years afterward to
those who did not leave for America); see the following note.

3. This passage shows JQA involved in at least a double confusion; and since JA and AA also, like many other Americans—historians and tourists alike—have been similarly
confused, JQA's allusion to “the brownist Church” at Leyden requires clarification. By the term
“brownist” JQA unquestionably meant the English Separatists, later commonly known as the Pilgrim
Fathers; see the preceding note. But to call John Robinson's company Brownists was
not accurate, for although the eccentric Robert Browne (1550?–1633?) is regarded as a precursor of New England Congregationalism, those Englishmen who
followed Robinson first to Amsterdam in 1608 and in the following May to Leyden rejected
much of Browne's teaching, and Robinson expressly rejected the term “Brownist” as
applicable to his views. It was hardly to be expected, however, that 18th-century
Americans, great as their reverence was for the Pilgrim Fathers, would be aware of
such theological niceties.

A worse confusion, and one that still troubles modern American pilgrims to Leyden,
concerns the place where Robinson's company worshiped. JQA implies that it was in a building then still standing. A year and a half later JA was to write: “I have been to that Church in Leyden where the Planters of Plymouth
worshiped so many Years, and felt a kind of Veneration for the Bricks and Timbers”
(to Samuel Adams, 15 June 1782, NN:Bancroft Coll.). During her only visit to the Netherlands, AA also, of course, paid her respects to the founders of Plymouth Colony: “ I would
not omit to mention that I visited the Church at Leyden in which our forefathers worshipd
when they fled from hierarchical tyranny and persecution. I felt a respect and veneration
upon entering the Doors, like what the ancients paid to their Druids” (to Mary Smith
Cranch, 12 Sept. 1786, MWA, printed repeatedly in CFA's editions of AA, Letters, 1840et seq.). But the fact is, and was, that Robinson's company of Separatists had neither their
own church building nor the use of any other in Leyden. If they had, it would have
been a matter of public record, and no such record has been found by successive generations
of diligent investigators. One of the first and most competent of these, the British
scholar George Sumner, writing in 1842, concluded “that their religious assemblies
were held in some hired hall, or in the house of Robinson, their pastor,” which was
in 1611 described as “large” { 41 } (George Sumner, “Memoirs of the Pilgrims at Leyden,” MHS, Colls., sd ser., 9 [1846]:51–52). Sumner also identified the source of the Adamses' and
others' confusion as Rev. Thomas Prince's famous Annals, first published in Boston, 1736, which in a footnote related that “when I was at
Leyden in 1714, the most ancient people from their parents, told me, that the city
had such a value for them [the English Separatists], as to let them have one of their churches, in the Chancel whereof he [Robinson] lies buried, which the English still enjoy” (Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New-England, in the Form of Annals ..., Boston, 1826, p. 238). This would make the cathedral church of St. Peter's (the great Pieterskerk, 1593) the
Pilgrims' church, for here, as Sumner found from its records, Robinson was buried
(although not in the chancel). What must have been pointed out by the Leydeners to
Prince and later American visitors as the Pilgrim Church was the English (often and
perhaps more correctly called the Scotch) Presbyterian or Reformed Church, which by
coincidence had been founded at the same time that Robinson's congregation came to
Leyden. With state approval and support, this church conducted public worship for
almost two hundred years in a chapel allotted to it in a church on the grounds of
the Cloister of the Veiled Nuns or Beguines (the Falyde Beguynhof). This church, as
the Dutch scholar Plooij has pointed out, was “a part of the Dutch Reformed Church,
organized as a separate congregation merely on account of the language used in its
meetings.” It was “Presbyterian, nonepiscopal, and Non-conformist,” but was “a State
Church” (D. Plooij, The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View, N.Y., 1932, p. 47). The building the city provided backed up on the garden plot
of Robinson's house on the Kloksteeg and in modern times has been used as part of
the University's library; eventually most of the Leyden Pilgrims who stayed behind,
including Robinson's widow and children, joined this congregation (same, p. 48, 90–91,
103). Sumner, who located the records of this church in Leyden for the period 1609–1807,
concluded that “it is this chapel which, from being shown to American travellers as
the old church of the English, has, I believe, been sometimes supposed by them to
have been the church of the Pilgrims” (MHS, Colls., 3d ser., 9 [1846]:49; see also p. 63–69).

Clearly this is what happened in the case of the Adamses, and it is confirmed by the
extensive researches of the Dexters; a diagram in their monograph, though it is in
part conjectural, shows the close physical relationships among the Pieterskerk, John
Robinson's house (long since gone) where the Pilgrims conducted their private religious
meetings without state support or interference, the large lot behind it on which small
houses for some of Robinson's people were built, and the Beguine Cloister abutting
that lot (Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, Boston and N.Y., 1905, p. 500 ff.).

JA eventually corrected himself (and Benjamin Waterhouse) on the distinction between
the followers of Browne and those of Robinson, in a letter to Water-house of 8 Jan.
1807 (MHi: Adams–Waterhouse Coll.; Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, p. 39–40), but he persisted in believing that the church he had attended in Leyden
was the church of the Pilgrims.

The Scottish “parson of the brownist Church” whom JQA met was named William Mitchell, according to the records printed by Sumner (MHS, Colls., 3d ser., 9 [1846]:66).

Docno: ADMS-04-04-02-0025

Author: Warren, Mercy Otis

Recipient: Adams, Abigail

Date: 1780-12-21

Mercy Otis Warren to Abigail Adams

[dateline] Plimouth Dec. 21 1780

[salute] My Dear Mrs. Adams

I should have wrote before according to promiss, but have been prevented the use of
my Eyes by a Cold fixing there and Even now { 42 } believe I had better not write, but unless I do your Excelency may think it too Great Condesention to inquire after the Cottagers, at Plimouth.

You have spent a week at Boston, and what think you of affairs now. I dare say you
have Collected many Curious annecdotes, and have had opportunities of observing much
on the Manners, [ . . . ] petition,1 inclinations and Adulation of the times.

We have scarcly heard from the Capital since we left it, and so totally secluded is
this place from any thing that passes in the rest of the World, that only one Common
News paper has found Its way hither since we were at your house. Yet I have more than
a Ballance for all the Amusements the City or the Court can give, when my best Friend is my Companion, my Children are well, and Domestic
peace reigns under my Roof.

Have you found an opportunity to forward my letter to my son, and do you hear any
thing to be Communicated from yours or their Good father.

I forgot to ask when at Braintree why you was so solicitous when at Plimouth for the
Copy of a letter to my son on his reading of Chesterfeild. Whither Mrs. Adams had
made any use of it, and what, and if she had done with it to return the Manuscript.2

Tomorrow is a sort of Festival in this town.3 I Wish you and yours and some other Choice Friends were hear to make it truly so.

A thousand Reflections might occupy the Mind on this occasion, and then I beleive
I must keep them and hasten to shut my Eyes, least I should not be able to read your
Epistles which I soon Expect.

A Word or two on Trade and Commerce. Have not sold a single Article nor Can. The town
is full of Hank a[chiefs.]4 Your price is too high. They are dull at a Doller. But shall not sell so without
your order. I will send the Apron by Mr. Warren. You need not send the silk till I
Call for it. Perhaps I may prefer the taking some other article in Lieu therof.

What did my Freind do with a billet Left to her care for my sister. She never Recevd
it.

2. Mercy Warren's epistolary essay on Lord Chesterfield's letters to his natural son,
24 Dec. 1779, a copy of which re-mains among the Adams Papers. See AA to Mrs. Warren, 28 Feb. and 1 Sept., { 43 } both in vol. 3 above, and, for the publication of the essay in a Boston newspaper,
AA to Nathaniel Willis?, ante 4 Jan. 1781, below.

3. The earliest American annual patriotic “Festival,” Forefathers' Day was celebrated
at Plymouth on 22 Dec., beginning in 1769 under the convivial sponsorship of the Old
Colony Club. (The Club had a short life, but its role as sponsor was later taken over
by the Pilgrim Society.) The date chosen was supposed to be the anniversary of the
landing of the Pilgrims at “Forefathers' Rock” (later called Plymouth Rock), given
by William Bradford in his History as 11 Dec. 1620. Forgetting, or not knowing, that the difference between the Julian
and Gregorian calendars in the 17th century was ten rather than eleven days as in
the 18th century, the promoters of the celebration made an error of a day (it should
have been the 21st), which later occasioned a warm dispute among antiquarians. The
records of the Old Colony Club, 1769–1773, are printed in MHS, Procs., 2d ser., 3 [1886–1887]:382–444. For the dispute over the date, in which JQA found himself somewhat ludicrously involved, see same, vol. 20 [1906–1907]:237–238.